Doing it ourselves

I26

We've already been compromised and co-opted…[b]ut out of that…I think movements will continue to grow. Underground movements, grassroots movements...there was a woman I spoke to a few weeks ago, she's from San Francisco, where a huge grassroots midwifery movement took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s and...she said, ‘what do you do when women just start catching each other's babies and no one has titles, and no one has credentials, and no one has equipment, but yet that's what women want, and babies are well, and women are well, what if we just caught each other's babies?’ What would that look like? What message would that give?

Plugging into radical politics

I15

Discussion often degenerates very quickly and is not about trying to find...strategic solutions to problems but rather is about getting defensive and wanting to yell about why your strategy is the best and I don't want to engage in that kind of debate. I don't really have any time for it because I think that our strategy right now should be to be talking to people about what's fucked about the system that we live in….[How] are you going to plug people into radical political movements? We're at a point where there's not a lot to plug people into...that's meaningful, that's consistent, that's going to enact actual social change. What we need to be doing is building people’s understanding of why the system that we're living under is the root of the problems that we're facing.

Dark futures

I8

I might not live to see it, it might be a hundred years after I die, but [the] fall of democracy, [the] fall of the monetary system, I see that accelerating. I actually can almost see it before I die. Just the way capitalism is like a cancer, they both want the same thing, constant growth, and just like cancer it's starting to chew on itself, and it's starting to get out of the control of the masters, and cracks are starting to show in its facade, and it's evil, and I just feel that blackness getting thicker, [like] fog.

Radical fetishes

I5

I think systemic mass movements are absolutely a priority if we want to change the world. I think political party activism, in the way that it exists in places like the global North, but I'd say also in the global South in many places, is a red herring that should be avoided. But I'd also say that about supposed forms of radicalism like primitivism, like deep ecology to a certain degree, like the idea that there's certain forms of radicality that are fetishes in and of themselves. Insurrectionists would do well, I think, to look back to the history of anarchism's propaganda of the deed which was very brief, and short lived, and bloody, and totally ineffective. You want to create an insurrectionary movement? Build a base and defend communities and move from there but you're not going to create revolution by throwing a firebomb.

Talking strategically

I15

The discussion that's had around diversity of tactics is shallow. I think that we…[talk so much] about tactics that we don't ever talk about strategy and I don't necessarily think that diversity of tactics, writ large, is a strategy in itself….If I say that we accept a diversity of tactics, there [are still] obviously some tactics that [some] people support more than others and I think that we need to do better to define what we mean when we say…‘diversity of tactics’ because we never mean all tactics….[T]here's always people who think that engaging with government is selling out and there's always people who think that breaking windows is violence.

Reproducing violence

I20

One of the things...I saw a little bit while working in other countries that had had big revolutions, like Cambodia for example or some Latin American countries, is sometimes the revolution is as frightening as what was there before. It may change the power...but it doesn't seem to change what happens to people in terms of violence in their day to day life [or allow better] access to the things that they fought for. So I guess some element of me is as leery of what we will do in the name of change...

Radical values

I6

I don't want to point to a specific example of an activist initiative and say that this is the guide to the future. My own feeling is that there are values that I think I'd like to see broadened to be values that people can work with. Things like solidarity, affinity, autonomy, cooperation over competition, these sorts of vague themes. And then there are various experiments with those which are sometimes inspiring, like cooperatives. Those sorts of things have those values in them.

Winning without utopia

I18

I really don't like utopian thinking because I really don't think if we were to beat back the forces of global capital that that would result in paradise on earth. I think there would still be a lot of challenge and struggle. But when I think about winning there would be a cap on how much any individual would be allowed to make, there would be a cap on how big any business [would be] allowed to be, there would be way more of a relationship between the [resource extraction and production processes] of any kind of industry….The people who live near that source, the people who extract that resource, the people who manufacture and do the labour producing that resource, and the whole shipping and distribution of that would be totally reformed to reflect sustainability and social justice, equality amongst workers.

Selling people short

I19

Personally I'm really critical of [the belief that] in order to mobilize people [you] have [to] appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think that really sells people short….If we take the G8 organizing [in the] spring [of 2010], I remember being at a meeting and someone said using the slogan ‘stop globalization: another world is possible’ was too political and they had to take ‘stop globalization’ out of the slogan. It's just kind of, like, really? I mean the reality is not that many people are going to come out to this protest anyways, do you have to make it so watered down? It's a watered down slogan as it is but to water it down even more to be just ‘another world is possible’ it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Reaching people

I7

There's lots of people who, if you tap into their values in the right way, will be able to get onside with you in a way that at least will keep us going, that at least will keep us on a more positive track. I think it's just a matter of bringing out those values and framing them in such a way that they enable us to make more intelligent political decisions.